BLOOD on the PLOW: EXTREMIST GROUP ACTIVITY DURING the 1980S FARM CRISIS in KANSAS
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BLOOD ON THE PLOW: EXTREMIST GROUP ACTIVITY DURING THE 1980s FARM CRISIS IN KANSAS by CALEB CORRELL Submitted to the Department of History of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for departmental honors Approved by: Dr. David Farber, Thesis Coordinator Dr. Sara Gregg, Committee Member Dr. Jonathan Hagel, Committee Member Date Defended: Wednesday, May 1, 2019 On February 23, 1983, Phil Donahue started an episode of his talk show seated across a table from a bespectacled, well-dressed man in a blue suit and black tie. Donohue’s guest was the self-titled “National Director for Counter-insurgents of Posses of America” James Wickstrom. Wickstrom’s respectable appearance became secondary to his diatribes, which came wrapped in a rapid-fire cadence with a Midwestern accent. Wickstrom indicted a complex system he believed was disenfranchising white Christian farmers in the United States: “international bankers and the private central bank called the Federal Reserve of the United States.” When Donohue pressed Wickstrom on the antisemitic and racist beliefs of his group, Posse Comitatus, Wickstrom answered that they were “pro-Christian” and dedicated to defending what he described as a Supreme Court-affirmed “Christian republic” in the United States. Wickstrom also stated that Jews had “their own nation in Israel” and that he did not “believe anyone should pay a progressive Communist income tax.” Phil Donahue later asked Wickstrom about the legal theories of Posse Comitatus, in respect to property foreclosures, to which Wickstrom replied that all lending institutions were illegal and unconstitutional. Wickstrom further clarified that in response to “despotism” of law enforcement officers and politicians carrying out foreclosures, Americans had the right under the Declaration of Independence “to overthrow or destroy this despotism.” Wickstrom compared this situation to what “our ancestors” lived under in 1776 under British rule.1 James Wickstrom’s appearance on Donahue and subsequent notoriety in the national media came during the nationwide search for Gordon Kahl, a North Dakota farmer and Posse Comitatus adherent who killed two U. S. Marshalls’ agents attempting to apprehend him in February 1983. Kahl’s shootout and subsequent search were among many incidents of violence 1 “Donahue” (Chicago, February 23, 1983), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lePZ2eYwojEI. 1 that broke out during the 1980s farm debt crisis in the United States Midwest.2 In contrast to the economic situation for most Americans, farmers and ranchers in the Midwest enjoyed prosperous economic conditions. The détente policies that opened the Soviet Union to American grain exports helped raise land and commodity prices to record highs. With these flush conditions and the encouragement of the Nixon administration farmers were encouraged to expand their operations to “feed the world.”3 Farmers responded to these conditions by buying more land, seed, and additional and technologically upgraded equipment. Ultimately, many farmers went deeper into debt to make these purchases. The farmers’ high indebtedness laid the seeds for an economic crisis. Eventually, the high production started bringing commodity prices down in the late 1970s, worrying many in agriculture who saw foreclosures looming. The American Agricultural Movement (AAM), with roots in the grain producing regions of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas, began sounding the alarm early in the crisis. Under the AAM banner, farmers took to the streets of their state capitals and in Washington, D. C. with “tractorcades” (motorcades of tractors) demanding action from elected officials and threatening production strikes to stabilize prices. The farmers were not successful in convincing federal or state officials into action nor were they successful in creating a general agriculture strike.4 The price downturns of the 1980s particularly hit Kansas farmers hard and these farmers were at the forefront of the effort to demand relief and support. In 1980 commodity prices and land values in Kansas went into freefall after President Jimmy Carter’s decided to embargo American grain shipments to the Soviet Union in retaliation for the 1979 Soviet invasion of 2 Associated Press, “AROUND THE NATION; 2 U.S. Marshals Killed In Shootout With 3 Men,” The New York Times, February 14, 1983, sec. U.S.; Associated Press, “Dakota ‘Fanatic’ Hunted in Slaying of 2 Marshals,” The New York Times, February 15, 1983, sec. U.S.; Ronald Smothers, “Vigilantism Stressed by Group Linked to Suspect,” The New York Times, February 16, 1983, sec. U.S.. 3 Barry J. Barnett, “The U.S. Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s,” Agricultural History 74, no. 2 (2000): 366. 4 Barnett, “The U.S. Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s.” 2 Afghanistan. Midwestern farmers started losing their farms to foreclosure at a record pace, and agriculture in the United States was in a full-blown crisis. The 1980s farm crisis hit Kansas agriculture particularly hard as it was one of the leading grain-producing states.5 Similar to Kansans before them in the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Populist movement in the late Nineteenth Century, Kansans in the 1980s took to populist political activism. Some Kansas farmers even took to direct-action, like tractorcades, protesting farm auctions, reviving the “penny auctions” of the 1930s, and the ubiquitous planting of white crosses on the county courthouse lawns in memoriam of the farms lost to foreclosure. Then, too, a few rural Kansans decided they needed to take more drastic measures by following calls to execute a radical revolution through a group called Posse Comitatus. A disparate group of angry Kansas farmers, in their struggle for answers to their economic travails, turned to out-of-state far-right extremist groups. These groups offered Kansas farmers facing foreclosure solutions to save their farms through arcane court filings. They also embraced the use of armed resistance. Posse Comitatus and similar groups railed against what they claimed was an illegitimate banking and economic system controlled by an international Jewish cabal that deliberately dispossessed distressed Kansans from their farms. Posse activists warned that these Kansans would—and should--take up arms to keep farmers on their land and ultimately, protect white Christian dominance of the United States. These extremist groups fused older traditions of agrarian populism with emerging white nationalist ideologies and conspiracy theories to give an outlet to rural Kansans who felt dispossessed amid an economic crisis. The number of Kansans who joined these far-right extremist groups were small and made little 5 Barnett, “The U.S. Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s”; Neil E. Harl, The Farm Debt Crisis of the 1980s, 1st ed, The Henry A. Wallace Series on Agricultural History and Rural Studies (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990); Jay Ward, “Agriculture During the Reagan Years” (Ph.D., University of Missouri - Columbia, 2015). 3 impact on saving family farms. However, through violent threats and incidents, these groups’ ability to spread extremist rhetoric gave law enforcement officials in Kansas much cause for concern in the 1980s. While few Kansas farmers joined the cause of the extremist groups, their right-wing neo-Populist ideology amid an emerging conservative political climate in the 1980s irrevocably influenced rural Kansas beyond the end of the farm crisis. The 1990s saw a rise in conservative economic populism in rural Kansas that persisted into the next century. The early twenty-first century conservative Republicans took over the state government and representation in Washington. They borrowed a similar language that far-right activists in Kansas in the 1980s had utilized amid the farm crisis, particularly in calls for a modern-day Boston tea party. Historians have published little on the 1980s farm crisis in Kansas and the extremist group activity it produced.6 R. Douglas Hurt has done the only major work about the crisis. He, however, focused on the less extreme AAM and their “lofty rhetoric, occasional violence, and practical politics” to define radical farmers during this period.7 Other scholars have written more generally about the actions of Posse Comitatus in connection to the farm crisis. Catherine McNichol-Stock wrote of two strands of rural radicalism: a left-wing populist rural producer radicalism and a culture of far-right wing vigilantism. Stock argued that a convergence of the two strands in the late twentieth century produced a new kind of political and cultural radicalism. This new political hybrid was embraced by a sliver of Americans during the 1980s farm crisis 6 Primary source research for this thesis comes from media accounts, law enforcement records, and the far-right literature of the 1980s. The Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements in the Spencer Research Library on the University of Kansas campus is one of the largest repositories of radical and extremist political materials in the United States and contains many documents from the groups active in Kansas. Also, the investigation records of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in the Kansas State Archives were useful as law enforcement was keenly aware of and concerned about extremist group activity in Kansas during the 1980s. Media accounts shaped the broad contours of extremist group activity during the period from local Kansas newspapers such as the Ottawa Herald, Salina Journal and the regional papers of larger circulation such as the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle. 7 R. Douglas Hurt, “Agricultural Politics in the Twentieth-Century West,” in The Political Culture of the New West, ed. Jeff Roche (Lawrence (Kan.): University Press of Kansas, 2008), 51–73. 4 and later, in the militia and survivalist movements as seen in Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing.8 Evelyn Schlatter, in Aryan Cowboys, has described late 20th Century trends of “vigilantism, fraternalism, and political and social extremism (especially rightist) …” that encouraged Western men to embrace ideologies that protected white male supremacy.9 On the other hand, Robert H.